Sleight of Hand
“There’s very few people that can beat me in golf,” Donald Trump
Please watch this short video.
First look for any objects on the green grass to the left and front of the man in the cart. There appear to be none. Then watch the two men wearing red vests walk in front of the cart. They are called caddies. Concentrate, not on the first man, but on the second, the man on the right. Pay particular attention to his right hand. Suddenly a small white object appears on the grass. It seems too small for a polo ball, too big for a moth ball, and too round for a marshmallow. Could it be a golf ball? Why, I believe it is. But where did it come from? Now the man in the white hat spies the round white object, gets out of his cart, and prepares to hit the ball.
That man is Donald Trump, the president of the United States. He is, by most accounts, a good golfer. He says his handicap is 2.8. which is very good. By contrast, I am not a good golfer and my handicap is 20.6. By that measure, the president is over seven times better than I am. In fairness, though, he plays a lot more than I do. How much of Trump’s handicap is due to such sleights of hand as shown in the video is hard to say, but in 2019, an accomplished and very funny journalist named Rick Reilly wrote a book on the president’s golf. It's called Commander in Cheat. In it he wrote of the caddies at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, NY, who have watched Trump kick his ball on the fairway so often that they nicknamed him “Pele.” The book is a good read, and very funny, although from the vantage point of 2025, the anecdotes seem less amusing.
For in the end, a golf score is only a number, and numbers seem to mean less and less these days. When the Department of Labor issued a jobs report last week that showed a weakening economy, the president called the numbers “rigged” and fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Upset with the environmental regulations that are currently keeping seven billion metric tons of auto emissions out of the atmosphere, Trump rescinded the endangerment finding, which has guided scientific analysis for the last 16 years. When he didn’t like the final numbers in the 2016 election, a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol in an effort to overthrow the government. And on and on.
Donald Trump is not the best golfer ever to lead a country. That honor goes to Kim Jong Il, the former supreme leader of North Korea. In 1994 he played the first round of his life at the grand opening of the Pyongyang Golf Complex, which has the country’s only 18-hole course. Kim, who was then in his early 50s and stood 5’3”, shot a remarkable 38 under par. At 7,700 yards, the Pyongyang course is longer than the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, and Kim had 11 holes-in-one. “Kim had the best approach to conquering the sport of golf,” reported ESPN. “Have your national propaganda department lie for you.”
It isn’t clear whether Kim Jong Il ever played a second round of golf. But his record has never been equaled. He died in 2011, five years before Donald Trump became president. They never had a chance to play against each other. It would have been a heck of a match to watch.